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Largely free of the manure odors that kept me from a life in agriculture, Faulkner Farm puts on quite a pumpkin patch, replete with red barns, hayrides, a pumpkin catapult, corn mazes and, best of all, a fine tri-tip sandwich, the only thing really keeping me in California anymore. The sprawling 27-acre Halloween attraction is largely a family thing but also draws the kind of hipster couples in which the leggy actress/model/mom is taller than her mate. It's located in Santa Paula, on that stretch of California 126 that runs from Magic Mountain to the sea. Ringed by farms and fruit stands, it's a terrific little harvest-season jaunt. Like driving the winding lines of a Robert Frost...

Related "Robert Frost" Articles

Largely free of the manure odors that kept me from a life in agriculture, Faulkner Farm puts on quite a pumpkin patch, replete with red barns, hayrides, a pumpkin catapult, corn mazes and, best of all, a fine tri-tip sandwich, the only thing really...

Wallace Stegner wrote books about the American and Canadian West, so it's understandable that people consider the longtime California resident a Western author.Stegner, a prolific novelist, essayist, conservation advocate and professor at Stanford...

I've always loved Robert Frost's line about home being the place where, "when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Perhaps I'm putting an overly optimistic reading on it, but the idea that even on our coldest, darkest nights, there...

THE BEST WAY TO VERMONTFrom LAX, United, US Airways, Delta and JetBlue provide connecting service (change of planes) to Burlington. Restricted round-trip fares, including taxes and fees, begin at $508. Public transportation outside the Burlington area...

The quietest room in Hollywood may be the office where John Williams composes. In a bungalow on the Universal Studios lot, steps from the production company of his most frequent collaborator, director Steven Spielberg, Williams works alone at a...

Foodies tend to move like flocks of birds, swarming a chic eatery, and then — swoop — off to the next. One of their newer perches in Los Angeles is in a part of town that hasn't had much of the food spotlight. Post & Beam opened on New Year's Evein...

Good fences make good neighbors, as Robert Frost wrote, but they aren't always a good barrier against the mighty Santa Anas. And now that last week's fierce winds have settled, you might have found the better part of your neighbor's ...

Concerning E.M. Forster
Frank Kermode
Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 192 pp., $24
E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel" is required reading for students of the genre. Originally delivered in 1927 as the Clark Lectures at Trinity College in...

Oxford Revisited
Justin Cartwright
Bloomsbury: 222 pp., $18
Travel writing is a category filled with subsets and divisions, but there are two principal modes. The first is that of discovery -- a voyager sets out to find a place that he or she has never...

Love and Summer
A Novel
William Trevor
Viking: 212 pp., $25.95
That William Trevor has not yet received the Nobel Prize in Literature strikes me as a shame. Surely his absence from the list of laureates has more to do with the politics of national...

CRITICISM IN AMERICAN CULTURE: New releases
Here are five titles that put the lie to the notion that criticism is a dying art.
Corn Flakes With
John Lennon
And Other Tales from
a Rock 'n' Roll Life
Robert Hilburn
Rodale: 280 pp., $24.99
Hilburn,...

Quick: What do rocker Melissa Etheridge, self-help guru M. Scott Peck and troubled insurance giant AIG have in common?Answer: A common misreading of one of America's most famous poems. All have made use of a line from Robert Frost's 1916 poem,...

In October 2002, a trim, white-haired poet named Don Thompson sat down in a farmhouse in the San Joaquin Valley and wrote a poem called "Turning Sixty." In it, he compared his birthday to the climb of "a few degrees on the thermometer"...

The Passages of H.M.
A Novel of Herman Melville
Jay Parini
Doubleday: 454 pp., $26.95
"The time for me hasn't come yet: Some men are born posthumously," Nietzsche wrote in "Ecce Homo." It's a statement that might have provided...

William Golding
The Man Who Wrote 'Lord of the Flies': A Life
John Carey
Free Press: 574 pp., $32.50
William Golding, the writer, has been a subject for study: reviews and critical essays, a bibliography and more than 100 books about the books....

Anton Chekhov
A Brother's Memoir
Mikhail Chekhov, translated from the Russian by Eugene Alper
Palgrave Macmillan: 230 pp., $25
Anton Chekhov's life is well documented: When he died of consumption in 1904 at age 44, he was honored all over the world....